Share this story

Padma could have kept quiet. Many women in her small community in Nepal do.

Fair enough – they are usually working very hard. Their husbands mostly live abroad to earn extra money so they have sole responsibility for their children, livestock and homes.

Many also work on tea plantations, earning as little as £1.20 a day for their labour – less than the cost of a mother’s day card in the UK.

Padma makes ends meet for herself, her son and daughter by raising two goats, two cows and seven chickens on a small piece of land.

But she spoke up because, on top of all of this, her home and land are threatened by regular flooding. So are most houses in her village, which lies in a flood plain near the Mechi River in Nepal’s Terai region.

Excited young faces look round a stack of brightly coloured Lego. Who can build the tallest tower? Whose will be the most colourful?

You can see similar scenes anywhere in the world, but these children are in Homs, a key battleground in the Syrian conflict.

Playing with toys like Lego and talking to the children is just one of the ways the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) – a partner to the British Red Cross – gives emotional and psychological support to children living through the war.

It brings some fun and a brief respite to children who have already seen more than most.

People in Mongolia are used to harsh winters. But this year the winter is even worse than usual: the country is in the grip of a ‘dzud’ (pronounced zood) – a hot, dry summer followed by a freezing, windy and snowy winter.

Temperatures average lower than -40° Celsius at night. Can you imagine?

Just before Christmas, an orderly queue stretched for hundreds of feet from desks where men and women sat with paper, pens and envelopes of full of cash.

But this was not a holiday celebration: it was a Red Cross support programme for 17,000 families affected by earthquakes in Nepal’s Kathmandu valley. The worst in 80 years, the quakes destroyed over half a million homes last April and May.

Nepal’s destroyed houses typically had thick walls to withstand the winter weather and many people no longer have this protection. With political issues also leading to a steady rise in the price of heating fuel, keeping warm has become a challenge.

Imagine the population of Birmingham – around one million people – having to flee their homes and live in tents, abandoned buildings or temporary shelters. Now imagine this happening at the same time in Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield.

This is a guest post by Ruth Newman, Nepal programme officer for the British Red Cross

When the massive earthquake struck Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley last April, I was about to board a plane on the other side of the country. Not knowing about the quake, I landed in Kathmandu less than two hours later surrounded by panic and devastation – buildings had crumbled, people were trapped, and electricity supplies and mobile phone networks were down.

But there was a wifi connection so I quickly logged onto Facebook on my phone to tell family and friends that I was OK.